If you’re at all like me, every so often you’ve watched coverage at the time or a documentary later about some great disaster, one that has taken many lives in horrific circumstances. You might have wondered — I have, anyway — about how or whether families and friends ever found out what happened to some of the victims. If you think of Hiroshima, or the tsunami of March 11, 2011, or even the events of September 11, 2001, you suspect — no, know — that there are people who died whose fates will be forever unknown to anyone this side of the Pearly Gates.
It is sad to see a newspaper die. It is sadder still when that death is a particularly gruesome suicide. For just under 15 years I was associated with a small paper in my small town. I wrote a weekly column — this column — for all of that time; for four rewarding years I was also the paper’s photographer.
With this column, “The View From Mudsock Heights” enters its sixteenth year. It began 15 years ago and and I’ve not missed a week since.